Journal of the History of Philosophy

312 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL ~996 virtues of his subject, and by attempting to know Dilthey better than he knew himself, has surely issued a provocation to all those who thought Dilthey's hermeneutics a thing of the past. Rather, like the past itself, Dilthey comes to meet us. JOHN GERARD MOORE Emory University Avrum Stroll. Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. 196. Cloth, $35.oo. Avrum Stroll aims to provide a "critical analysis" of the treatment of the epistemological issues to be found in three of G. E. Moore's papers and in Wittgenstein's notes On Certainty. In the first half of the book, Stroll concentrates on Moore's papers "A Defence of Common Sense" (DCS), "Proof of an External World" (PEW), and "Certainty" (C) (these papers have recendy been reprinted in the new collection of Moore's Selected Writings, published in 1993 by Roudedge). Stroll largely follows the view that in these papers Moore presents a dogmatic response to sceptical arguments--insisting that he knows for certain what the sceptic denies that he knows, and yet refusing to argue in detail for his claims to knowledge or against the sceptic's arguments that these claims are mistaken. Stroll calls this Moore's "non-argumentative counter-strategy," and perhaps it is an interesting dialectical strategy--Stroll says (5o) "it is an achievement few philosophers have surpassed." But the important point here is that it was not the strategy of the historical G. E. Moore, who explicitly disavowed it in his "A Reply to My Critics" in The PhilosophyofG. E. Moore, ed. P. Schilpp (see esp. 668-89). In the context of Strolrs book, the following mistakes are worth noting. (i) According to Stroll, Moore says that he cannot prove scepticism to be wrong. But on several occasions Moore did claim that he had proved scepticism to be wrong--e.g., in DCS. (ii) According to Stroll, Moore refused to say how he knew such things as "I am standing up." But Moore does say how he knows such things--e.g., in C he says that he has for them "the evidence of my senses." (iii) According to Stroll, Moore "tended to conflate" idealism and scepticism. But Moore distinguishes very clearly between them (e.g., in DCS), and in his "Reply" makes it clear that PEW is intended to be a refutation of idealism and not of scepticism; it is precisely those like Stroll who persistently misread PEW as an attempted refutation of scepticism who are guilty of conflating idealism and scepticism. The effect of these mistakes is that Strolrs discussion of Moore is largely off-target. It is also disappointing that Stroll does not discuss Norman Malcolm's early writings on these issues: Wittgenstein's notes On Certainty arose directly out of his discussions with Malcolm of the latter's criticisms of Moore in his important paper "Defending Common Sense" (PhilosophicalReview 58 [1949]: so 1-so) and On Certainty owes a good deal more to Malcolm than is often acknowledged. Furthermore, in 1949 Moore wrote a long letter to Malcolm (reprinted in Moore's Selected Writings) responding to "Defending Common Sense" which shows how he would have responded to some of the criticisms made of him by Wittgenstein in On Certainty. Stroll simply endorses these criticisms; but his discussion would have been more interesting if he had taken Moore's BOOK REVIEWS 3~3 reaction to them into account. The actual historical dialectic involving Moore, Malcolm , and Wittgenstein is a good deal more complicated, and more interesting, than the story told here by Stroll. Moving on to Stroll's discussion of Wittgenstein, I should now acknowledge that, so far as I can judge, Stroll offers a largely reliable account of On Certainty. In particular, in the best chapter of the book, on "Wittgenstein's Foundationalism," he makes a convincing case for the view that Wittgenstein, unlike Moore, separates propositional knowledge from the kind of "non-propositional" certainty concerning what "stands fast" for us and which is primarily evinced in our ways of acting. What is less clear to me is just what kind of response to...